Let's write about syphilis and racism

Echo report published by National Public Radio:

Syphilis study at Tuskegee: 117-year-old Milbank Foundation publicly apologizes for its role in the racist study about syphilis and launches a partnership with Voices for Our Fathers Legacy Foundation.

“Voices for Our Fathers Legacy Foundation is transforming the legacy of our fathers, and grandfathers from one of shame, and trauma to honor and triumph,” said Lillie Tyson Head, president of VFOFLF. 

For almost 40 years starting in the 1930s, as government researchers purposely let hundreds of Black men die of syphilis in Alabama so they could study the disease, a foundation in New York covered funeral expenses for the deceased. The payments were vital to survivors of the victims in a time and place ravaged by poverty and racism.

Altruistic as they might sound, the checks — $100 at most — were no simple act of charity: They were part of an almost unimaginable scheme. To get the money, widows or other loved ones had to consent to letting doctors slice open the bodies of the dead men for autopsies that would detail the ravages of a disease the victims were told was "bad blood."

Milbank Memorial Fund : Echo apology for its role in the Tuskegee Syphilis study.

Fifty years after the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study was revealed to the public and halted, the organization that made those funeral payments, the Milbank Memorial Fund, publicly apologized Saturday to descendants of the study's victims. The move is rooted in America's racial reckoning after George Floyd's murder by police in 2020.

"It was wrong. We are ashamed of our role. We are deeply sorry," said the president of the fund, Christopher F. Koller.

The apology and an accompanying monetary donation to a descendants' group, the Voices for Our Fathers Legacy Foundation, were presented during a ceremony in Tuskegee at a gathering of children and other relatives of men who were part of the study.

The Milbank fund declines to try to justify what it did in the 1930s: Endowed in 1905 by Elizabeth Milbank Anderson, part of a wealthy and well-connected New York family, the fund was one of the nation's first private foundations. The nonprofit philanthropy had some $90 million in assets in 2019, according to tax records, and an office on Madison Avenue in Manhattan. With an early focus on child welfare and public health, today it concentrates on health policy at the state level.

Koller said there's no easy way to explain how its leaders in the 1930s decided to make the payments, or to justify what happened. Generations later, some Black people in the United States still fear government health care because of what's called the "Tuskegee effect."

"The upshot of this was real harm," Koller told The Associated Press in an interview before the apology ceremony. "It was one more example of ways that men in the study were deceived. And we are dealing as individuals, as a region, as a country, with the impact of that deceit."

Not all of the victims or their descendants knew of the fund's role:  Lillie Tyson Head's late father, Freddie Lee Tyson, was part of the study. She's now president of the Voices group. She called the apology "a wonderful gesture and a wonderful thing" even if it comes 25 years after the U.S. government apologized for the study to its final survivors, who have all since died.

"It's really something that could be used as an example of how apologies can be powerful in making reparations and restorative justice be real," said Head.

Despite her leadership of the descendants group, Head said she didn't even know about Milbank's role in the study until Koller called her one day last fall. The payments have been discussed in academic studies and a couple books, but the descendants were unaware, she said.

"It really was something that caught me off guard," she said. Head's father left the study after becoming suspicious about the research, years before it ended, and didn't receive any of the Milbank money, she said, but hundreds of others did.

Other prominent organizations, universities including Harvard, and Georgetown, and the state of California have acknowledged their ties to racism and slavery. 

Historian Susan M. Reverby, who wrote a book about the study, researched the Milbank Fund's participation at the fund's request. She said its apology could be an example for other groups with ties to systemic racism.

'"It's really important because at a time when the nation is so divided, how we come to terms with our racism is so complicated," she said. "Confronting it is difficult, and they didn't have to do this. I think it's a really good example of history as restorative justice."
Hundreds of Black men were targeted in the study

Starting in 1932, government medical workers in rural Alabama withheld treatment from unsuspecting Black men infected with syphilis so doctors could track the disease and dissect their bodies afterward. About 620 men were studied, and roughly 430 of them had syphilis. Reverby's study said Milbank recorded giving a total of $20,150 for about 234 autopsies.

Revealed by The Associated Press in 1972, the study ended and the men sued, resulting in a $9 million settlement from which descendants are still seeking the remaining funds, described in court records as "relatively small."

The Milbank Memorial Fund got involved in 1935 after the U.S. surgeon general at the time, Hugh Cumming, sought the money, which was crucial in persuading families to agree to the autopsies, Reverby found. The decision to approve the funding was made by a group of white men with close ties to federal health officials but little understanding of conditions in Alabama or the cultural norms of Black Southerners, to whom dignified burials were very important, Koller said.

"One of the lessons for us is you get bad decisions if ... your perspectives are not particularly diverse and you don't pay attention to conflicts of interest," Koller said.

The payments became less important as the Depression ended and more Black families could afford burial insurance, Reverby said. Initially named as a defendant, Milbank was dismissed as a target of the men's lawsuit and the organization put the episode behind it.
George Floyd's murder changed things

Years later, books including Reverby's "Examining Tuskegee, The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy*," published in 2009, detailed the fund's involvement. But it wasn't until after Floyd's death at the hands of Minneapolis police that discussions among the Milbank staff — which is now much more diverse — prompted the fund's leaders to reexamine its role, Koller said.

"Both staff and board felt like we had to face up to this in a way that we had not before," he said.

Besides delivering a public apology to a gathering of descendants, the fund decided to donate an undisclosed amount to the Voices for Our Fathers Legacy Foundation, Koller said.

The money will make scholarships available to the descendants, Head said. The group also plans a memorial at Tuskegee University, which served as a conduit for the payments and was the location of a hospital where medical workers saw the men.

While times have changed since the burial payments were first approved nearly 100 years ago, Reverby also said there's no way to justify what happened.

"The records say very clearly, untreated syphilis," she said. "You don't need a Ph.D. to figure that out, and they just kept doing it year after year."

* Since 1972, "Tuskegee" has become a word that stands for an infamous research study: a forty year endeavor on the part of the United States Public Health Service (PHS) to not treat African American men with late stage and presumably non-infectious syphilis, while promising them the aspirins, tonics and diagnostic spinal taps were treatment. The Study turned into a long effort (1932-72) to track nearly 400 men (the subjects) assumed to have the disease and nearly 200 men (the controls) assumed to be disease free in the countryside surrounding the city of Tuskegee in Macon County, Alabama. Despite the publication of a dozen research studies about the Study in medical journals over the years, there was major outrage when a newspaper reporter exposed it to the wider public in July 1972.

Reading and writing F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Gatsby" free of copyright

A literary premonition?  "....cleaning up the mess they made...", The Great Gatsby.

Opinion: 'The Great Gatsby' Enters Public Domain, But It Already Entered Our Hearts- An echo opinion by Scott Simon reported on NPR Weekend Edition:

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), an American author, famous for his depictions of the Jazz Age (the 1920s), published The Great Gatsby in 1925. Although it didn't sell many copies at the time, it has since sold nearly 30 million.

The copyright on F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby expired on the first stroke of 2021, and the book entered the public domain.

The classic 1925, novel of love foiled, ambitions foisted, class and betrayal sold fewer than 25,000 copies before Fitzgerald died. It has since sold nearly 30 million. Scott Simon gave his daughter the copy he had in high school, when she read it last year. 

In fact, The Great Gatsby has been turned into stage productions, an opera, five film versions, a Taylor Swift song and inspired innumerable prequels, spinoffs and variations.

In the public domain, Gatsby may now become even more familiar. Two new editions are about to come out and who knows what kind of projects — a Gatsby rom-com? Gatsby joins The Avengers? — might now get a green light, which recalls the imperishably eloquent last passage of the book: "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us."

Gatsby's Jazz Age Long Island may not look like a microcosm of contemporary America. But then, neither does Don Quixote, The Scarlet Letter, Macbeth or Their Eyes Were Watching God. 

We want young readers to be able to see themselves in stories; but literature can also show us that people we don't think are much like us at all turn out to have some of the same heart, blood and dreams. That can be the power of empathy in art.

As we think of this past, trying, and tragic (pandemic) year, we might all imagine some names, many in high places, of those who disdained wearing masks, and brushed aside guidelines to hold events, when Fitzgerald writes of "careless people" that "smashed up things and creatures, and then retreated back into their money, or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."

Quote here

Amy Jo Burns, who wrote the acclaimed novel Shiner last year, said she read The Great Gatsby as a high school junior in Appalachia. "[W]e were sons and daughters of roofers, welders, teachers and truck drivers — people who knew what it meant to work hard and receive very little in return," she said. "We all loved that book. More than anything, I think we imagined Fitzgerald himself whispering to us from behind his own words, saying, 'Do you think the idea that you can 'have it all' is a lie? So do I. Let's press on it together and see if it cracks.' I think Fitzgerald wanted to break our hearts so we could remember that they were still beating inside our chests."

Spies revealed - Crime in Process: a NPR book review

Crime in Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump

Successful spy novels are based on real events and facts. Although they are published as fiction, the thrillers like the 1963, Cold War novel, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold by John le Carré; the World War II thriller, Eye of the Needle  by Ken Follett, The Day of the Jackal  by Frederick Forsyth, and Topaz by Leon Uris, were plots that were rooted in history.

This National Public Radio review about the book, Crime in Process, by Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, is about a modern spy who contributed to the history of political espionage. And, what's more, is apparantly still doing his job. This is the revealing history behind Fusion GPS, and how the salacious and notorious "Steele Dossier" came to prominence, as a result of Russian interference in the United States 2016, election.

Reported by Philip Ewing for NPR

There's an unverified story that has circulated placing Donald Trump in the presidential suite of the Moscow Ritz-Carlton in 2013.

NPR has not detailed it because it remains unverified. Trump and his supporters have called it outrageous and ridiculous.

So where did it come from?

Seven Russian sources told British specialist Christopher Steele the hotel anecdote, write Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch in their new book, Crime in Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump.

Simpson and Fritsch, former Wall Street Journal journalists, are the founders of the now-famous or notorious private intelligence firm Fusion GPS. They hired Steele to investigate Trump and said they, too, were surprised about what came back.

Their book steps through that and other tumult that resulted when the Fusion bosses decided to break with what they called their normal practice to eschew political jobs and excavate what they believed would be a lucrative vein: a man they call a "faux billionaire scam artist."

That work and their story is now familiar from headlines and congressional hearings, so one of their most interesting topics is Steele — the man who, for a time, seemed to be everywhere but whom nobody knew.
Invisible man

Steele spent his career working for the U.K.'s foreign intelligence service, MI6, and assembled a network of contacts in Russia that he preserved after getting into the private intelligence game in 2009, the authors write.

Those contacts told the Ritz-Carlton story and much else after Simpson and Fritsch commissioned Steele to find out what he could about Russia and Trump, then a political upstart who threatened — and later destroyed — the GOP establishment in the primaries.

Other Republicans wanted to stop Trump. Initially, a conservative billionaire bankrolled the work of Simpson's and Fritsch's company.

When Trump dominated the Republican primaries and the GOP establishment began to accept him, Simpson and Fritsch made a pitch to Democrats, who took over the account. During that phase of the work, they reached out to Steele, a contact they had made years earlier.

So who really is Steele — this faceless man who unleashed a vortex of mishegoss* and mangled American politics?

Per Simpson and Fritsch, he is a level-headed striver who made his own way through Cambridge — even though he "didn't come from money" — and thence through MI6 and the heartbreaking loss of his first wife.

Steele, the authors stress, is not just a pro but a good bloke. Simpson and Fritsch describe covering drinks for the group in Washington and then Steele reciprocating in London at the pub.

"After a beer or two — but never three — Steele would drop talk of how to gin up business and reveal a genuinely deep and warm laugh while speaking of his nature walks and a budding interest in bird-watching," they write.

Translation: He is a good egg, per Simpson and Fritsch, and certainly not a scurrilous maker-up of falsehoods from whole cloth.

The dossier

How then, to explain glaring questions about the Russia reporting? The Ritz-Carlton story wasn't the only problematic allegation.

There was also the story about Trump's then-attorney Michael Cohen allegedly taking part in a direct relationship with Russian agents as part of the 2016 election interference — an allegation that Cohen denied vociferously and which also has never been verified.

Well, sources report what they know or what they've heard, Simpson and Fritsch argue, but that doesn't mean it's always right.

What about the allegation, sourced to Steele by The New Yorker, that Steele's contacts said Russia's intelligence agencies vetoed the prospect that Trump might nominate Mitt Romney as secretary of state?

That extraordinary nugget reportedly came in after the expiration of Steele's contract with Fusion — and that could be why it appears to have been left unexplored in Crime in Progress.

But it's an instructive example.

This either would amount to shocking evidence about unprecedented control over U.S. life seized by a foreign power — which somehow could run a clandestine channel to Trump in order to communicate its will ... or ... it could be more evidence that someone, somewhere in this game of telephone might not be on the level.

So, separate from the Romney allegation, what about the prospect that Russian intelligence might have deliberately fed disinformation through people it knew had contacts with an adversary, in Steele? His official cover was blown years ago.

No, Steele told Simpson — Russian influence-mongers worked all along to help Trump. They wouldn't do that, Steele argues, by undermining him with outrageous stories such as the Ritz-Carlton anecdote: "The ultimate Russian goal was to prevent Hillary Clinton from becoming president, and therefore, the idea that they would intentionally spread embarrassing information about Trump — true or not — is not logical."

The 70% doctrine

Steele has told associates, the authors write, that he believes "at least 70 percent of the assertions in the dossier are accurate. On that he hasn't wavered."

For example, Russia really did intervene in 2016 to help Trump against Hillary Clinton. Trump's then-adviser Carter Page really did travel to Moscow in 2016 and make contacts there that even Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller couldn't fully establish in his report.

Page really had been in contact with Russian intelligence officers and was on the FBI's radar. He maintains that he has done nothing wrong and, indeed, hasn't faced criminal charges.

Mueller's report, meanwhile, alludes to Steele's reporting on Page 23 of Volume II, describing the "unverified allegations" published in early 2017 by BuzzFeed.

Why did that happen?

It was Steele, the authors write, who felt compelled to go outside the arrangement he had with Fusion GPS and transmit what he had learned to the FBI.

If it had been up to Simpson and Fritsch, they write, Steele's reporting never would have seen the light of day.

But they and Steele felt so alarmed by what his sources reported that they arranged for it to pass via intermediaries to the authorities — and, eventually, it found its way to news organizations, including NPR, in early 2017.

The explosive effects of its publication are still resonating. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and other Republicans broached it again this week in House impeachment hearings.

"President Putin and the Russian securities services weaponized our own political opposition research," Jordan said, quoting one witness.

"That is exactly what happened in 2016 ... It is sad," he concluded. "It is sad what the country is going through. I wish it would stop, but unfortunately, I don't think it is."

'A more sinister explanation'

Simpson and Fritsch tell the story in brisk, workmanlike prose.

For readers who've been following the news closely since 2016, their book offers an intriguing step behind the scenes of familiar headlines and fills in gaps about the public understanding of Fusion GPS and the role it has played before and since Trump's election.

People who aren't closely engaged might find Crime in Progress to be tougher sledding as it delivers a rockslide of names, dates, cross-connections and bite-size explainers.

It also is a story without an ending, the authors write, because central questions about Trump — and whether powerful Russians or others may have some hold on him — haven't been resolved, they say.

As for skeptics or Trump supporters? Let's not kid ourselves; this book was not written to bring them in or change their minds.

Critics will find objectionable passages on nearly every page, such as this one:

"Why did Russians keep dangling business deals that never seemed to go anywhere? Why was Felix Sater so close to the Trumps, even traveling to Moscow with Ivanka and Don Jr. in 2006? Maybe, Trump did this out of desperation, or maybe it was just a failure to vet his business partners properly. Or, quite possibly, there was a more sinister explanation. Either way, Fusion had the sense that couldn't answer some of the crucial questions surrounding Trumps's conduct through open records alone. It needed a new avenue of inquiry to get a better feel for what was happening within Russia itself ..."

Steele was that avenue, and he swans into and out of the story throughout the book, ready with a quip even when trouble comes looking for him.

The authors describe a campaign by an archenemy, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., chairman and now-ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, to target and destroy Fusion. Nunes flies to London to try to get a meeting with the heads of British intelligence to try to undermine Steele.

"But this was amateur hour of the highest order: The agencies flatly refused to meet with him. He did, however, meet with a junior national security official, who very politely told him nothing," according to Steele's sources.

The former MI6 officer was not impressed, per the authors.

"This Nunes is a proper clown," Steele told Fritsch. "It's stunning he thought that would work."

*i.e., "craziness!"

PostScript- Obviously, the world has not experienced the climactic ending to this spy story in process.

Grief Cottage - interview with Gail Godwin with Scott Simon

http://www.npr.org/2017/06/03/531347369/-grief-cottage-a-ghost-story-about-loneliness-loss-and-affection

"Is it OK to call this novel a ghost story?"

'Grief Cottage': A Ghost Story About Loneliness, Loss And Affection

Gail Godwin - a new book called Grief Cottage. NPR's Scott Simon, asks her about it, about getting older and about ghosts.

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

A stranger in the mind of an 11-year-old boy named Marcus gestures at an abandoned old home and tells him, people who go in don't always come out. 

Now, do you think that'll keep that boy away from the house they call Grief Cottage? It's a ghost story set on an island off the coast of 1990s, South Carolina and in the life of a little boy whose mother has died in a car accident and before she could tell him it was his father. "Grief Cottage" is the latest novel from Gail Godwin, the critically acclaimed and best-selling novelist. She joins us now from Woodstock, N.Y. Thanks so much for being with us.

GAIL GODWIN: I'm so glad to be here.

SIMON: Why do they call the old house Grief Cottage?

GODWIN: The locals on this small island call it that because 50 years ago, in a hurricane, there was a family who came late in the season. It was October, hurricane season. And they never knew what happened to the family. The mother and the father and the boy just disappeared during the hurricane. So the cottage had a dark aura to it. And so they just called it Grief Cottage.

SIMON: And, of course, there's no way Marcus is going to stay away, is there?

GODWIN: Oh, no. If you are an 11-year-old boy with a bike and lots of time on your hands and you'd heard about this, of course, you'd be going up there. And you'd probably be courting something to happen even though you were terrified it might.

SIMON: Is it OK to call this novel a ghost story?

GODWIN: Yes. It's a ghost story. And it's a mind story. And it's a story about loneliness and loss and affection.

SIMON: I want to ask you about - you have another character on the island, Carol Upchurch. She's 95. And...

GODWIN: Yes.

SIMON: She - I wrote down what she tells little boy Marcus. She says, quote, "these days I have to put in request to my brain as one does at the library. And then a little worker takes my slip and disappears into the stacks. May take him a while, but he always comes back with the goods." I gather you're going to turn 80 in a few days?

GODWIN: Yes. And that - Coral's experience came right from mine. As you get older not only do you get more picky with your words, but you lose them. You used to have lots of servants. And you just pulled the bell like in "Downton Abbey," and they'd all rush up with trays full of things. And now you pull the bell, and you wait for this very arthritic old butler who's your only servant left. And he comes up with his wooden tray, and there's one word on it. But it's a good word.

SIMON: (Laughter) That's that's very vivid.

GODWIN: But you know what? I'll tell you two good things that have happened to me this year.

SIMON: Sure.

GODWIN: One is I've had an old schoolmarm living in me all my writing life, and she has either retired or died. Her favorite mark of punctuation was the colon because the colon says to the reader - stop; now I'm going to say something important. You may not know this - so getting rid of her and also feeling that my materials were more available to me than they have ever been.

SIMON: Your materials - your choice of words, your emotional depth?

GODWIN: It's the themes, really, that attract you and obsess you. In my case, why people do the things they do? What are the ranges of human possibility, both good and bad - just human, human, human. So it's that kind of material. But also, my last two books, I have noticed I'm writing shorter, sharper and crisper. And truth - truth on an essential level is more important to me...

SIMON: Boy.

GODWIN: ...Than ever before. I mean, if I'm going to write about loggerhead turtles, I want to know about them and not say anything that's false, fake.

SIMON: Yeah. I do have to ask you, with this wonderful novel - all right, I'm going to consciously phrase it this way. How many ghosts have you seen?

GODWIN: That's a - good for you. I didn't expect that. OK, the sharp true answer is I saw a bunch of them in my 36 year when I'd moved to an old house by myself and made a lot of changes in my life. And they were all changes to do with forfeiting my security for a while. So I saw some people just in this house at night.

And the other time was right after I got to Miami to work on the Miami Herald. I guess I was afraid. And I was living in this hotel near the old Miami Herald. It was called the Robert Clay. And I woke up one night. And there was a man in white standing over my bed, and he looked like he was either going to - either he was going to choke me or feel my pulse. I never decided which.

But I do believe my people. When they see ghosts, they really see them. And I've read a lot about this. And it's - you're particularly vulnerable to it when your psyche is vulnerable and floats looser than usual from your body - from your stability. Have - you have never seen one?

SIMON: I don't believe I've ever seen a ghost. I have heard my late mother.

GODWIN: Oh, your mother. Sounds wonderful. Listen, absence can always be present. Don't you believe that?

SIMON: Yes, I do very much so. I believe in that. And that helps us get through. Gail Godwin, her novel, "Grief House." Thanks so much for being with us.

GODWIN: You are very welcome. It was nice talking to you.

(SOUNDBITE OF KATHLEEN EDWARDS SONG, "GOODNIGHT CALIFORNIA")

SIMON: And tomorrow on Weekend Edition Sunday, a conversation with John Grisham about his new book, "Camino Island" - gang of thieves, rare books and a circle of writers.